1. Technical Field
The disclosure generally relates to user actuated pointing devices for use with a computer. More particularly, the disclosure relates to enhancing the scrolling schema of wheeled mice.
2. Related Art
The computer mouse has simplified the computer-human interface. Before the computer mouse, many users were confined to interacting with a computer through the use of a command line interface (CLI as is known in the art). The computer mouse (also commonly referred to simply as “the mouse”) has, in recent years, been improved upon with the inclusion of a wheel on the top of the mouse. An example of a wheeled mouse is shown in FIG. 1. The function of the wheel 106 is to scroll the text or document or image located below a displayed cursor 113 shown on a visual display device 112. The wheel is preferably linked to an optically encoded wheel for sensing the rotational location of the wheel 106. To allow for feedback to the user, the wheel contains a number of notches (not shown for simplicity). When rotated, a user is presented with tactile feedback of the distance rotated through sensing the number of notches rotated by the wheel. The function of the wheel 106 is interpreted through signals sent from mouse 101 through cable 110 to computer 109 having memory 114 and processor 115. Shown for completeness is keyboard 116, which is generally used in combination with mouse 101 for various operations as are known in the art. For example, rotating the wheel away from the user may scroll the underlying displayed content down so as to show another portion of the displayed content immediately preceding the originally displayed content. Likewise, rotating the wheel toward the user may scroll the underlying displayed content up.
A user may specify a scrolling mode of either scrolling by a fixed number of lines (referred to herein as the “line-scrolling mode”) or scrolling by page (referred to herein as the “page-scrolling mode). To change from one scrolling mode, or to modify the number of lines to scroll in the line-scrolling mode, a user navigates a series of windows to a preferences option list for the wheeled mouse. In general, the preferences page allows selection of the scrolling mode as well as a designation of the number of lines when a line-scrolling mode is selected.
Other features of a wheeled mouse and alternative techniques of navigating a display through the use of the wheeled mouse are disclosed in U.S. Ser. No. 09/212,898, filed Dec. 16, 1998, for “System and Method of Adjusting Display Characteristics of a Displayable Data File Using An Ergonomic Computer Input Device,” whose contents are incorporated herein by reference.
Scrolling through a document via the wheel on a wheeled mouse is helpful in that it provides useful document handling without the need to access the keyboard or predefined scroll bars. However, as a document's size changes or the needs of a user change (for example, from drafting a document to editing or reviewing a completed draft), the user may desire to change the scrolling mode. Changing modes requires navigating to a mouse preferences page, switching the scrolling mode, changing (when appropriate) the number of lines to scroll with every rotational notch in the wheel, and finally returning to the underlying document. These combinations of steps detract from the ease of using the scrolling feature of a wheeled mouse. Accordingly, an easier technique for switching between scrolling modes is needed.